Stuart Berman's thoughts and opinion

December 21, 2008

The ice caps are growing

We hear that now more than ever we need to combat global warming and the future administration is going to pour a lot of energy and money into it (as well as appointing a global warming fanatics as scientists in charge). A scientist would find this shocking since the science does not support this but any student of politics understands application of red herrings.

I heard Matt Lauer say, “Next we’ll take a trip to the Arctic, where the ice is melting fast”.What followed some commercials was a story that said:“…the Arctic, where the climate is changing rapidly and not for the better.”The trouble with the above statements is that they’re not true.You can check the extent of Arctic ice at the University of Illinois Cryosphere website:http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/You’ll find that the Arctic icecap reached a record (and we only have a 29-year record) low in 2007.The icecap has been growing at a fairly rapid rate since, gaining 7% in just the last year to bring it back to 2002 levels.Alaska is having one of their coldest years ever, and the ice is not “melting fast” it’s actually growing fast.Also, the Antarctic icecap reached a record maximum in 2007. The TV story also showed a graph of the loss of Arctic ice from 2005 to 2007. Obviously, the story they wanted to tell was that the ice is “melting rapidly” If they had included 2008, or done a graph from 2002 to 2008, or from 1989 to 2008, it would not have had the same dramatic effect as the graph that was shown.

USA Today has an article that attacks meterologists for espousing these views but if you read the comments you get a better picture.

I just read an excellent post by Andrew Freedman at Capitalweather.com about the puzzling disconnect between TV meteorologists and the climate science community. It's a balanced, reasoned assessment of what I've noticed is an unwillingness by weathercasters to embrace what the vast majority of climate scientists accept as a given.

Here was Bill Steffen's response (in 2006) to the USA Today piece:

I have been a TV meteorologist for over 32 years…my degree is from the Univ. of Wisconsin at Madison – double major, Physical Geography.

My observation is that TV meteorologists are more skeptical of two things…first the total emphasis on man/C02 to the almost total exclusion of anything else in this climate debate….and second the nightmarish scenarios that dominate media coverage and a very vocal part of academia. We are skeptical of these computer models, partly because we do deal with them on a daily basis and know their math and therefore their limitations…but we are also skeptical of some of the modelers who have a financial and political interest in policy decisions that would result from action taken in response to their alarm. TV meteorologists are not beholden to big oil/industry or to the government grants and far-left policies that drive many of the alarmists. We do think the Earth is warming…that there are a number of reasons for this. I think that TV meteorologists are in general more conservative/skeptical people. Conservatives tend to go into business and engineering, liberals to government and media, conservative meteorologists to broadcasting.

There is little talk about solar cycles (there are articles discussing the shrinking of the polar ice caps on Mars and the moons of Jupiter). There hasn’t been a decent volcano since Pinatubo in ’91…less volcanic dust means more solar radiation reaching the ground. Dozens of Arctic stations across the Dew Line in northern Canada (remember, to warn us if the Russians sent ICBMs over the Pole) were closed. Russia has also closed stations…that in a small way is going to upset the balance of ground stations that become the base for the computer models. Temperatures are only measured accurately over about 14% of the globe. Where these temperatures are measured most accurately (the U.S.), the warming is less pronounced. Over the oceans we rely on IR satellites. I can show you IR pictures from Lake Michigan that are 5 degrees off the actual surface temperature of the water. Methane is a five-times more potent greenhouse gas than CO2…but has no political consequences, so it’s hardly considered. There are MANY thermometer sites that were in cooler, rural – forested environments 50 years ago that are now sitting amid concrete and asphalt. These thermometers will be giving warmer readings now.

We as a group (and there are many of us) resent when the media announces that “no credible scientist denies that global warming is going to kill us all…etc, etc”. That is a total untruth and reporters who word their pieces that way are either ignorant or biased.

I can show you comments from Hansen back around 1990 when he said that he’d looked at every temperature and there was no warming going on…was he wrong then (and if so why should we trust him now)? The world worships Al Gore…heck, he’s got the hurricane rotating backwards on the poster for his movie! He has no meteorological training, yet he’s given instant credibility over PhDs.

If you look at the data for my town (Grand Rapids) there is hardly a difference between temperatures 100 years ago and now. We have had warmer late falls and winters of late…but we have also had FEWER 90-degree days in the last 10 years than at practically any time in the last century. Most people and animals would prefer a slightly warmer climate. We go to Florida on vacation, not Baffin Island! A longer growing season would be a positive, not a negative. The positive aspects of a small (and less than 2-degrees is small…we used to have palm trees growing in Grand Rapids) temperature rise are never discussed.

If these people really cared about the planet, they’d find a way to address the growing C02 problem coming out countries like China (40% of the growth in C02 is China!), India, Indonesia, Brazil, etc. It’s only the U.S. that has to shut down industry and drive weenie-mobiles.

Climatic variability is the natural norm and I remain unconvinced that man/C02 is a greater danger to me than mad dictators with nukes.

Bill SteffenWOOD and WOTV4Grand Rapids, MI

Which point of view is more convincing? And more importantly why would people give up so much liberty based on the word of those who are so blatantly political such as Al Gore or the folks at the U.N.'s IPCC?